Abstract

Key to structured prediction is exploiting the problem’s structure to simplify the learning process. A major challenge arises when data exhibit a local structure (i.e., are made “by parts”) that can be leveraged to better approximate the relation between (parts of) the input and (parts of) the output. Recent literature on signal processing, and in particular computer vision, shows that capturing these aspects is indeed essential to achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, in this context algorithms are typically derived on a case-by-case basis. In this work we propose the first theoretical framework to deal with part-based data from a general perspective and study a novel method within the setting of statistical learning theory. Our analysis is novel in that it explicitly quantifies the benefits of leveraging the part-based structure of a problem on the learning rates of the proposed estimator.